What happens when we examine medicine not just as science, but as shaped by the same forces that created interlocking systems of racial dispossession in housing, education, employment, policing, and incarceration? Drawing on accounts of anthropologists, historians, artists, physicians, journalists, philosophers, and epidemiologists, students will learn to use narrative accounts and concepts from Black Studies and the medical humanities to explore the conditions that create illness and disease. Throughout the semester, our seminar discussion will engage with successful models of community care, grassroots organizations that have developed innovative health practices, and centers led by Black midwives. Central to our investigation is reimagining what medical practice and education might become when approached through a different analytic lens, one that includes the insights of Audre Lorde, Franz Fanon, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, and more. Perhaps in this work of reimagining, we might begin to understand what it takes to build equitable health systems.

This course delves into the intersections of art, culture, and public health, particularly Hip Hop as a form of public health knowledge acquisition. Through an examination of various texts, archives, and research methods such as ethnography, autobiography, and social and oral history, students will explore how different forms of creative and cultural expression force us to reimagine what health justice looks like, feels like, and sounds like. Central to our exploration is attention to sound and the body — how so much of life is constituted through what we hear, how we listen. The structure of this course is largely organized around an independent multimodal project, where students will create a sonic map that investigates how sound makes up our lives, how it structures our cities and neighborhoods, and how it shapes the ways we feel and move through the world.

How might we theorize otherwise when the very documents that preserve history also function as instruments of erasure? What does it mean to make poetry from the past? This course explores different methods for engaging with the archive. Students will explore how poets, artists, and scholars use primary source materials — letters, photographs, legal records, oral histories, medical case files — to create new kinds of historical writing. Through experimental workshops, students will also practice techniques of fragmentation, juxtaposition, and erasure to create their own documentary poems using found texts, newspaper clippings, historical documents, and other source materials.

What does it mean when some of the sharpest insights about health justice come packaged in punchlines? Through satire, the hit-series The Boondocks elevates overlooked aspects of health and material security, transforming systemic failures into resonate comedic sequences. Through engagement with The Boondocks, this course explores the use of humor and other forms of cultural expression to challenge and reimagine our current healthcare practices. Additionally, this course examines how film, video, photography, drawing, and interactive media function as an archive of community health knowledge — ethnographic resources that illuminate the complexities of our social world. Students will explore pressing health issues as well as engage core readings in cultural studies and visual anthropology to develop analytic approaches that extend beyond summaries and plot descriptions. By emphasizing these interpretive skills, students will learn to extract health discourses from different cultural forms, recognizing how seemingly disparate texts — from academic articles to animated satire — collectively participate in broader conversations about well-being, justice, and community care.

From Batman’s crimefighting in Gotham to the gritty realities of precinct politics in Law and Order, stories of heroes and villains have become central to how people understands justice, policing, and punishment. This course examines how superhero narratives, crime procedurals, and prison dramas shape our collective imagination about law enforcement and incarceration. Students will analyze how contemporary media — from Netflix’s Daredevil and HBO’s The Penguin to long-running series like Law and Order — constructs ideas about good and evil, vigilante justice and institutional authority, and rehabilitation and retribution. By examining these popular representations alongside current events and policy debates, students will engage in critical discussions about the very nature of justice itself: How is justice represented? What does justice mean? Who gets to define it?